Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Welcome to Marius Peelen's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab

The visual cognitive neuroscience group investigates the neural basis of interactions between visual perception and cognition, between seeing and thinking. We investigate how the brain extracts meaningful information from complex but structured scenes, how objects and scenes are represented in the visual cortex, and how visual cortex activity interfaces with cognitive functions such as memory and attention. We also investigate the various ways in which the visual cortex supports cognitive tasks without visual input, such as during visual imagery, working memory, and internally-directed attention. In ongoing work, we investigate how the brain combines seeing and visual thinking (imagery), how people differ in this ability, and why it can be difficult to rapidly switch between seeing and thinking, for example as a result of aging.

We are based at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Lab news:

05/25: New EEG decoding paper reporting the neural time course of size constancy in natural scenes, published in Cortex.
05/25: New paper in Communications Biology, using neural networks and fMRI to show the importance of object representations in predicting emotion ratings of scenes.
04/25: Join us at the CAOs workshop in Rovereto, Italy; May 7-9
03/25: New paper in Cognition, reporting our first inattentional blindness experiment in the muZIEum (N>13.000!).
02/25: In this recent review paper, I summarize some of our recent work investigating the neural basis of visual search in scenes.
02/25: Congratulations to Leni Wei for being selected for a PhD position at Ruhr University Bochum!
02/25: Two new preprints about dynamic context effects on object processing, both with Giacomo Aldegheri and Surya Gayet: "Changes in scene distance automatically drive scaling of object representations" [link] and "Dynamic context-based updating of object representations in visual cortex" [link].
01/25: Congratulations to Linlin for successfully defending her PhD! See Gallery for some pictures.
01/25: Welcome to Yoana Petrova, starting her MSc internship in the lab.
12/24: A short introduction to the field of Visual Cognitive Neuroscience in the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
11/24: Welcome to Daan Roelofs and Cas Rekoert, who will do their MSc internships in the lab.
11/24: My inaugural lecture can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6Q6a4u69Y
10/24: Preprint reporting reduced inattentional blindness for upright human bodies, in a very-large sample (N>13.000)
10/24: Everyone is welcome to join Marius's inaugural lecture on the 21st of November (at 15.45), register here
10/24: Excited to share our fMRI/eye-tracking study investigating how object associations guide search in scenes, out now in Science Advances
10/24: Preprint reporting the neural time course of size constancy, by a great team consisting of former lab members Lu-Chun, Surya, and Daniel.
10/24: Congratulations to Linlin for having her PhD thesis approved (the public defense will take place on the 20th of January).
10/24: New paper in JOCN investigating the electrophysiological correlates of visual memory search, in collaboration with Iris Wiegand and others.
09/24: New paper for an upcoming special issue of Vision Research, reporting an MEG study investigating the effects of attention and scene context on object category decoding.
09/24: Welcome to Leni Wei (post-MSc intern) and Cas Rekoert (MSc intern), who will work on analyzing data from the Healthy Brain Study.
09/24: Aaron Schnippe successfully defended his MSc thesis and will move on to do a PhD in Munich - congrats!
08/24: Congratulations to Qiu Han for winning an ECVP poster prize!
06/24: The proposal for a new BSc in Human Neuroscience at Radboud University was positively evaluated by the Accreditation Organisation and will start in September 2026.
05/24: Symposium on mental imagery and sensory sensitivity in Tilburg, organized by Tessa van Leeuwen.
05/24: CAOs workshop in Rovereto, with profs Bonini, Fattori, Fiehler, Hebart, Jenkins, de Lange, and Wurm!
04/24: Visual perception symposium at the Neuronus conference in Krakow, Poland.
03/24: New paper in iScience, showing how knowledge biases visual memory of body postures.
03/24: Marius appointed professor of visual and cognitive neuroscience (link)
03/24: Marius receives Vici grant to work on the interplay between internally and externally generated representations in visual cortex (link)
02/24: New paper in JEP:HPP, investigating visual search for objects at different distances in scenes . pdf
02/24: New paper in eNeuro, using EEG to demonstrate how top-down attention facilitates memory search. link
02/24: New paper in J Neurosci, investigating the neural correlates (fMRI, MEG, DNN) of cued and oddball visual search. link
02/24: New paper in JEP:HPP, investigating the automatic retrieval of real-world object size knowledge using the size Stroop effect. pdf
12/23: Congratulations to Surya for winning the NVP Early Career Award!!
11/23: Review Predictive processing of scenes and objects published in Nature Reviews Psychology
11/23: Welcome to Lydia, who will do her MSc internship with us.
09/23: Giacomo successfully defended his PhD! See some picture here and the full thesis here.
08/23: Paper "Testing cognitive theories with multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data" out in Nature Human Behaviour [see here for preprint]
07/23: Maelle's first paper published in JEP:HPP!
06/23: Talia's paper investigating object-based sharpening of scene representations now out in Cerebral Cortex. See the Twitter thread for a summary.
06/23: Paper showing that observers automatically predict object orientation based on scene context out in Cognition. See the Twitter thread for a summary.
06/23: Preprint investigating where, when, and how neural similarity between targets and distractors predicts visual search performance
06/23: New preprint: Objects in familiar constellations evoke high-level representations of real-world size
05/23: Marius joins the Science Advances editorial board
05/23: Congratulations to Marco for winning an abstract award at the CAOs workshop!
05/23: Preprint investigating the attentional template for near and far search using behavioral measures.
05/23: Review paper on Predictive processing of scenes and objects
04/23: Preprint investigating dynamic context effects on object perception.
04/23: What drives the automatic retrieval of real-world object size knowledge? This is the question we addressed in a recent study (preprint).
04/23: Preprint showing that objects sharpen scene representations now online.
03/23: fMRI paper on statistical learning of spatiotemporal structure, in collaboration with Floris de Lange's group, now available here.
02/23: Welcome to Aaron (MSc intern) and Natalia (visiting PhD student)!
01/23: New paper on the boundary extension illusion published in Psychological Science.
12/22: Can neuroimaging data be used to test cognitive theories? Read our take on this in this preprint.
12/22: How does knowledge affect the perception of body postures? See our recent results in this preprint.
11/22: Giacomo completes his PhD by submitting an impressive thesis, starting the next day with a postdoc in Amsterdam.
11/22: Congratulations to Sushrut for a very convincing PhD defense.
10/22: Check out our new preprint on how expected distractor context biases the attentional template.
09/22: Paper out in Journal of Vision: Statistical learning of distractor co-occurrences facilitates visual search
09/22: All the best to Chuanji Gao, who will return to China to start his own group after a fun and productive time with us
09/22: Welcome to Eelke Spaak, who will be affiliated with the lab while he builds his own group.
08/22: Paper out in JEP:HPP: The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. (preprint)
07/22: Congratulations to Jochem for completing his MSc internship and thesis (Cum Laude)!
07/22: Welcome back to Lu-Chun, who joins us as a postdoc after finishing her PhD in Taiwan
06/22: New paper investigating the time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. Soon to appear in JEP:HPP.
05/22: Welcome to Susan, who will do a remote internship with us from India
04/22: Paper out in NeuroImage: Body shape as a visual feature: Evidence from spatially-global attentional modulation in human visual cortex
04/22: Preprint showing that learned co-occurrence statistics between distractors increases search efficiency
03/22: Congratulations to Giacomo for winning a Donders poster award!
02/22: New paper in JEP:G: "Affective valence of words differentially affects visual and auditory word recognition". Preprint here.
02/22: First experiment started in the muZIEum! We will measure inattentional blindness for a range of objects. See here for background.
01/22: Marius starts as speaker of Donders Institute Theme 2 (Perception, Action and Decision-making).

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